One trans woman told me, “I just said to myself, well try the sex change, and if you still don’t like it, you can kill yourself later.”

I could be very wrong, but I see the humor in that. And I understand the desperateness of that statement at the same time. So I wanted to bring those tensions together in this memoir, explain the hilarity of this Very Special Journey knowing that much of it is layered in other, decidedly unfunny things.

As humor writers tell it, comedy happens because readers are moved to feel superior to the object or person that is making us laugh. I have no problem being the focus of that superiority. I have broken 10 bones in my life; I have earned the title Klutz Supremo. And there was no reason to think that my transition would be any less accident-prone or gosh-darn funny. But what really drove me to put these experiences into book form was the idea that I made it through. I came out the other side. And I’m still a functioning person, as are my friends who’ve done the same. My sense of humor and my living in a better-fitting body really did the trick!

I’m happy to say that having a gender transition is really not that different from other kinds of human journeys, and at the same time, it’s wildly out there. I love those distinctions. I’m glad I know what it’s like to communicate at work as a woman and as a man, because now I know this whole Venus Mars thing is bunk. People are the same; it’s the expectations they bring to every engagement that makes for miscommunication. And that is funny.

Shoulder hair is funny, too. Even as it makes me growl with displeasure to see Brillo pads rising up out of my frame. I’d love it if other people laugh along with me, whether they intend to keep their genders or not.

I’d developed a protocol for using the men’s room that actually did not involve wearing a hazmat suit, but I left open the possibility that I may go there at some point. Given the state of men’s mass-use rest room facilities, I thought having a process would only help me. I couldn’t hold my bladder forever.  And so when entering a men’s room, I would do the following:

Walk toward the door, put out right elbow and open door with elbow. Use elbow to check each stall, use first one that is clean, already flushed, and that appears to have toilet paper. Close stall, being careful to block the infrared beam so the toilet doesn’t think it’s time to flush all over one’s trousers. Carefully remove disposable toilet seat cover being careful not to rip it in the process. Set disposable toilet seat cover on toilet seat being careful to continue blocking infrared sensor and not to touch the actual toilet seat. Pirouette on left ball of foot such that infrared sensor is still blocked, but not fast enough that disposable toilet seat cover hovers off of the toilet seat. Drop pants and underwear, sit down gingerly and do one’s business. When finished, lean over only slightly to toilet paper dispenser being careful to continue blocking infrared sensor. Pull down toilet paper directly and not to the side so as not to break the line of toilet paper. Bundle into other hand until critical mass is achieved. Rip toilet paper at least three squares away from toilet paper roll, so as to be able to retrieve more toilet paper if needed, otherwise end of toilet paper roll will retract and glue itself to the roll, never again to be separated from the rest of the roll. This is known as the “Borg Effect.”

Clean up body parts that have done one’s business, being careful to continue blocking the infrared sensor. Carefully stand up, putting both hands under thighs in order to ensure complete separation from the disposable toilet seat cover, which is now partially wet and seeking only to cling to you as you put back on your trousers. Ensure disposable toilet seat cover is in toilet by checking over one’s shoulder and keeping one’s body aligned in an upright position so as to block the infrared sensor. Consider career as a master thief because one has now acquired quite the infrared sensor managing skill set. Move into a half-squat position so that the tops of underwear and trousers are in reach, and pull up to re-dress. Now comes the tricky part! Listen for the “sigh” of the infrared sensor as it realizes it needs to flush the toilet. Leap with both feet, forward 2.5 feet, or just before the inside of the stall door, whichever comes first, so as to avoid the sudden spray of water, toilet paper, disposable toilet seat cover, and whatever business one did in there. Open door and walk to sink counter. Run hands under infrared sensor of sink and get them wet with tepid water, use soap from whichever dispenser pretends to have some, rinse with more water from the tap, then walk to the paper dispenser and wave hands frantically in front of it, trying to get that infrared sensor to dispense paper. If no paper dispenses in 3 minutes, consider that one’s hands are now probably air-dried anyway. If paper dispenses, use paper towel to open rest room door, exit, and throw paper away in one of the 37,000 wastebaskets between this men’s room and one’s cubicle.

More immediately, it gave me a little bit of a conundrum: should I continue working on my superhero/satire novel, or go back and get rid of 20,000 words on the memoir to make it more marketable and increase the pacing?

I couldn’t help myself in the moments after reading her email, which I admit, I read five or six times in case the words decided to reassemble themselves into an offer of representation. Then I opened up the manuscript file, and took out 4,000 of those damnable, unmarketable words. I don’t need to go on so much about men’s rest rooms, anyway, no matter how enlightening I think my insights are. (Really, they are.)

But my writing goal for this fall remains the same, rejection or no rejection. I’m working on SuperQueers, and I note that my rewrites are changing the tone a lot. I have to look out to avoid sounding like I’m derivative of Douglas Adams, and yet I want to keep it funny. There just isn’t enough funny science fiction out there. I think my other landmines are, in no particular order:

• Making it sound like too many kinds of subgenres—a little steampunk here, a little urban fantasy there, and suddenly I’ve overmixed my paints and created dog poop brown
• Worrying so much about marketability that I play it too safe with the writing—just writing that here makes the hair at the nape of my neck get buzzy and upset, but I’ve already been told by two professionals that it’s a great idea with mass appeal, so I need to just settle down on that
• Getting the balance of action and character development wrong—I started this novel in 2004 for National Novel Writing Month, and worked it up as a serial, initially. So it was run, run, run, to the detriment of fleshing out the characters in the story. My second rewrite told too much of their backstory, and now I think I’ve got just the right split. I intend to keep it that way, which means I have to keep an eye on any imbalances as I rewrite. I wish stories would thump like a washing machine in distress, but they don’t.
• Forgetting to enjoy the story I’ve created—having never worked on a project this long, I am vaguely concerned that all of it will get stale.  I let SQ sit around for years and germinate quietly in a corner of my head, and recently (read: last spring) it pushed its way to the fore again, acting much more demanding than it had previously. This is a good thing, because I’ve learned I can’t rush a story. But it’s time to get her done.

When I really need a break from SQ and it’s not time for Friday Flash Fiction over at Mad Utopia, I can work on stripping down Bumbling. But not pole dancing with Bumbling. Because I really don’t have enough dexterity for that crap.

Call me Captain Obvious, but after reading a lot—and I mean a LOT—of advice about face-to-face pitching story ideas to agents, I wasn’t quite sure how to go about it when the time really came due. So much of it was contradictory, or impossible to do at once, or over the top, or not applicable. So here is my list, after taking myself to my first writer’s conference, of what not to do, as obvious as some of these items may seem. I’m not saying I did these things, but I or someone I noticed did each of the things in this list.

1. Don’t use your pitch time or session for anything other than your finished work. They want to think you’re really into the thing you’ve written, and hello, you need to show you’re a closer and can finish a project.
2. Don’t get so into memorizing your pitch that you’re a nervous wreck when you sit down to pitch. I’m going to put on my usability evaluator’s hat and remind folks that we humans hear differently than we read. A few interesting words are fine, but agents aren’t going to dissect your perfect language by ear. I like the notecard approach, personally. You know your project, be confident you’ll advocate for it well, and leave the memorization to the . . . memorizers.
3. Don’t leave at the last minute to go to your pitch session. I don’t see how huffing and puffing and wiping sweat off one’s brow emits a glow of success. As I’m a classic overthinker, I also need to not give too much ramp-up time to myself, or I’ll work myself into a different kind of stress aura. Ten minutes beforehand to leave the workshop session, etc., is perfect.
4. Don’t waste your pitch time blowing smoke up the agent’s ass. They have to endure this so often some may have mounted smoke detectors inside their underwear. Which I guess would make it hard to sit, but that’s not the point. I think there’s a middle range agents like to see—where the writer knows a bit about their client list and book selections, and can compare their work with each. But there’s no point to looking like a stalker-in-waiting. That’s just freaky.
5. Don’t be an island unto yourself. Agents and editors and everyone in the book publishing business expects that writers are good readers—that we have knowledge of the other books in our genre of interest, that we know how to avoid duplicating other well known (or even somewhat known) plots and characters, that we want to contribute to the literature generally. Acting like we’ve been so well holed up in our literary caves that we don’t know what’s going on in the field won’t play well once the agent asks herself how we’ll market ourselves, because the answer will come back that we’ll look like asses.
6. For email queries, don’t rush querying. I know, I finished my memoir and went straight to the “How to Query an Agent” blogs and books. It was like a hot potato in my pocket, that manuscript. Hey, I have big pockets, okay? Go back and make it tighter. Hack out sections that really don’t need to be there. Let it sit in the drawer for a while and in the meantime, go fishing, catch a movie or *gasp* read a book. When you finally sit down, after all of that, to write your query letter, spend some quality time with it. What was the point in writing the best book ever if you’re just going to send out a half-baked query? The query is the singer of the band—the bassist may be great, but very few people will get past poor singing to notice the bass.
7. If an agent says no, leave them be and don’t hound them. One agent at the conference I attended says she receives the same query every day, starting more than a year ago. She’s never going to say yes to this person’s project. While that may be an extreme example, it’s a good reminder to respect an agent’s no. Keep refining your pitch and researching which other agents might be better advocates for your work.

I say all this in the midst of getting turned down for representation after the same agent asked for my partial manuscript, book proposal, and then full manuscript. That’s a long way to go in the process just to be rejected. It’s not easy, for sure, but I tell myself that if my project didn’t have any merit, I wouldn’t have heard back from anyone, much less the half dozen who’ve shown interest. And at least I know now that I should cut it down to about 80,000 words. It may be my baby, but heck, I’m trying to sell my baby, so who am I to complain about cutting it a little?

Okay, bad metaphor there. I do not encourage traumatizing babies, let me just point that out.

Writers, put yourselves out there. Keep pushing to be better. One of these agents, one of these days, is going to say yes.

PNWA Literary Contest: Congratulations!

I sighed as I clicked into the email and lo and behold, I was a finalist! I reread the email message two, three times. My memoir, out of more than hundreds, I presumed, was a finalist. I did what any self-respecting wannabe writer would do.

I posted it on Twitter and Facebook, and called my mother.

Fast forward to last night, at the awards dinner, my heart pounding in my chest, which wasn’t particularly a sensation I wanted to persist. I was very happy—thrilled, actually—to receive applause from my peers, agents, editors, and PNWA board members. Although I didn’t take one of the top three awards for my category, I was still honored, and pleased to have done so well with my first literary contest.

Do know that I’ll hang up the certificate somewhere where I’ll see it every day, from which to draw inspiration. Probably on the fridge.

Just kidding—I’ll put it in my work space, no worries.

For more on my experiences at the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Association annual conference, see my blog, trans/plant/portation.

• Tear another ACL
• Alienate any agents or editors by sneezing on them during my pitch sessions
• Stumble while standing up for hand claps, should I win in the memoir category
• Forget to bring my business cards

I will live-tweet the event from my memoir’s Twitter account: @bumblingmemoir. Make sure you follow me to hear all of my insipid—I mean, insightful—remarks about the workshops. And for more of my thoughts on conferences in general, check out this post over on trans/plant/portation.

There are two kinds of writers in the world, those who overwrite and those who work for test laboratories.

I often write more than will end up in a story or piece of nonfiction, and I see this as a blessing rather than a curse, since trying to pack things on a skeleton of prose is for me, difficult and prone to introducing everything from a non sequitur to a blatant inconsistency—I’m much more orderly when I stick to my process, which is:

Write down initial idea—this can be anything from a character I keep thinking about to a rare astrophysical condition to some circumstance that would explain a mystery

Expand on initial idea—Aliens on Parade grew out of a question I had about how traveling by wormhole could go wrong once in the hands of a lazy or in-over-their-heads government. I started thinking about technology: if we “discovered” how to open wormholes in space, would we also inadvertently be inviting people in? If answer = yes, then what happens?

Identify the actors—my bio sketches start out very simple and I grow them from there. Age, race/ethnicity, gender, orientation all help me figure out their positions, power, and privilege in society, whether it’s a society I’m trying to reflect or invent. Because I see these things at play in the actual world, I feel responsible to bringing them to bear in my writing. But their back stories are more complex. I’ll put in things like “was mugged two weeks ago,” “has unmanaged bipolar disorder and self-medicates with alcohol,” “won’t let anyone meet her mom because she’s on welfare.” I don’t feel the need to write out absolutely everything about them if I’m writing a shorter story, and I try to come up with circumstances for them that let me see greater depth of character when I need to.

Visualize the scenes—this gets harder for longer work, so I keep it flexible, and I will add and subtract to this list over time. I think of this like one would map out a scene shoot for a film. What do we have, where do we have it? I deeply appreciate any writer who can create scene description and keep it interesting, and not just because it’s a magical street in a magical city, which is supposed to be magically interesting all on its own. Once I’ve got a sense of my characters, I try to come up with places where they will be best expressed and then make sure it will work with the plot. If I can find a perfect setting to enhance the tone, then great. In my short story, Underwater, I tried to paint a minimal picture to ask the user to fill in with their starkest memories, while keeping the places in the story bereft of emotion other than tired and empty. I think it works for a story that’s under 2,000 words like this one. My novel-length sci fi piece, Superqueers, spends a lot more time showing different neighborhoods in Washington, DC, because I wanted to work against the every-city feel of other comic book hero stories. Incidentally that story grew out of an image I knew I needed to write 20 years ago, of a small greasy spoon diner and a very large man who drinks coffee there, spilling a lot of it and using many, many packets of sugar in the process.

Do the first draft and don’t stop—At this point, I can’t not write any longer; I have to type words out through my fingers now now now. I will take a few pages to get up to speed, although I don’t like seeing it this way. I’d love to think my work was perfect out of the gate, but in reality I’m in last place until the final turn, to drag the metaphor through the mud, mix it and beat it like a dead horse. I and most everyone I know need to do an awful lot of rewriting before I will say the words have been crafted. No blacksmith made a nail with the first strike. But this rewriting process will come later. I don’t worry about it because I’m writing, I’m progressing, I’m telling the story. I may not use the section or piece of dialogue later, but I will save whatever I write in the first draft. Everything lives in the first draft. If I sit down at the computer on Day 2 and I hate everything I wrote, I can start anew if I can’t write anything else, but I will not delete the crap from Day 1. Draft Number 1 holds onto everything. While I’m getting through this first draft I will return to the character bios and the scene list and the original idea, and update them. Matilda is allergic to strawberries. I need the boat out at sea, not at the dock. Those two characters are too similar so I’ll merge them into one and make a note to rewrite the dialogue in chapters 1–3.

Rewrite until it doesn’t suck—other people may have higher expectations for their writing, but I’m shooting for not laughable. Perhaps I’m being too modest; I think I’m a good writer, but I don’t want to get stuck on myself, and I know by now that things can always be improved. I have no love for self-absorbed writers, no matter their level of talent, so I strive not to become one myself. I can’t say when I think a story is done, but when I go through on say, the 20th pass and only have tiny changes to my language, it starts to occur to me to work on something else. I’m either blind to the quality of prose or I’m deadened to making changes and now’s the time to go revise something else or start something new. All the while pitching my best stuff to agents and journals. But that’s another post for another day. This rewriting phase starts out intense and mellows out, kind of like March. I’ll cut whole scenes, chapters, characters, change the ending, put in or take out subplots. Thank goodness I’m writing and not building houses, because I’d destroy every budget I saw.

With that in mind, here is the very original dream from my memoir that drove me, eventually, to transition. It’s no longer in the memoir itself, but it’s referred to and is the backstory for the main character—uh, namely me—and I revised it something like 10 times before I struck it entirely, so it’s rougher than the rest of the writing at this point.

Trees, everywhere, mostly evergreens. He looked around at them, some clumped up closely, branches looped together with their neighbors, some isolated from the rest, the lot of them with varying heights and apparent ages, climbing up the side of the mountain. Far below the side of the mountain the trees were reflected back almost perfectly from the surface of a very still, large lake. He wondered how he’d gotten here, patting himself down absentmindedly, as if identifying the things in his pockets would reveal a useful memory. Looking down at his clothes, he recognized an icon of sorts. Is that what they’re called? Icons? Stereotypes? He was struck by the idea of lumberjacks. This was probably because he was wearing a red flannel jacket, or shirt, he wasn’t sure. It was something in between, and it would later occur to him that there is in fact, a hybrid jacket-shirt-thingy for sale on the men’s fashion market, if one used a very loose definition of the term, “fashion.” But he did notice, after taking in the color and texture of it, that it wasn’t quite warm enough for the brisk morning air. Wait, was it morning?

He squinted at the sky, a pearly blue with a few wisps of cirrus clouds high, high away. Well, he knew what the hell a cirrus cloud was, that was a start. When had he learned about cirrus clouds? He had a clear memory of Mrs. Warms’ 8^th grade science class at that crappy Catholic school on the main drag in Princeton. The one with the scary nuns. And then on graduation day with their caps and robes on, they all looked like nuns and none of their parents were clued in to the trauma that their children were experiencing.

So okay, he’s made it past elementary school. Good to know.

He took a few steps, only then realizing he had on light brown worker’s boots, with his jeans pulled down neatly over the tops. It occurred to him to touch his head, and to his shock he realized he had on a knit cap. He took it off and inspected it. Navy blue, maybe, or black. Size 7. Carhart brand.

Holy shit, he really was a lumberjack. That couldn’t be right, could it? He looked around for an ax and a large blue beast of burden.

Before he could continue on trying to figure out who the hell he was, he heard a voice behind him.

“Daniel! Daniel! What are you doing over here?”

He turned around and saw a woman running up a trail he hadn’t noticed, what with the sky looking gorgeous and the trail looking blah. She was wearing her own knit cap, plaid jacket, jeans, and work boots. There apparently was some kind of outdoorsy uniform going on here. Her cheeks were bright red from the cold and her spontaneous bout of jogging. Brown curly hair stuck out in gravity-defying directions as soon as it cleared the tight hat. She left the impression of looking like a balding Troll doll that had spent some good quality time under a diffuser.

He had no idea why he knew what a diffuser was.

“Hi, Kathryn,” he mumbled. He knew her name. Another surprise. Who was Kathryn?

“Daniel, we need you at the mess. Why are you all the way up here? We’re running out of pancakes and French toast, and Jackie doesn’t know how to make the dishwasher run.” She put her hands on her knees as she bent over, panting.

“Daniel?” He looked at her. He knew her name, but he didn’t know why she was calling him this.

“Yes?”

“Who’s Daniel,” he asked.

“You, silly.” She stopped a moment. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing. I just didn’t think that was my name.”

“Uh, what did you think your name was?”

He started to say and then stopped. It wasn’t right. Under this brightening sky, in the cold air, dressed like an extra from a Monty Python movie, something wasn’t right.

“Nothing, I’m kidding. I just wanted to catch the last of the sunrise.”

“Well, we need you, Dan. Come on, before the President runs out of breakfast.”

“The PRESIDENT is here,” he asked, following her, feeling his footsteps crunch as he made them on the frosty ground.

“The President of the Bucks County PTA. It’s their group that picked the campground for their stupid conference this weekend.” She looked at him like he’d lost all sense. She wasn’t far off the mark.

“Right, right.”

“Jesus, what did you do last night?” Her hair bounced around as she shook her head. He had the distinct impression that her cap was about to shoot off of her head from the pressure of her curls.

They walked into the mess and half a dozen children were upon him, tugging at his shirt/jacket and looking for more flapjakcs as if they might be hidden in his pockets. He hoped he could remember how to make a pancake, if he didn’t even know this name she was calling him.

He passed by a mirror, and got a look at himself just before entering the kitchen. Tallish, with a big, thick beard, hairy wrists and hands, twinkling brown eyes, wrinkles that implied he had smiled more often than frowned in his life. He was a mini Paul Bunyan, in fact. He realized precisely then that he had always wanted to be Paul Bunyan and only Paul Bunyan. He loved who he was now more than ever, and it had taken a long time for him to become the man these people needed and cheered. And that was really odd, for some reason.

And then I woke up.

Bumbling into Body Hair: Tales of a Klutz’s Sex Change is my fantastic and amazing memoir about the ludicrous journey I took to the opposite gender. Part urban tale of burnout, and many parts cynical coming of age and snarky comebacks, this is a book that has already made people guffaw, wince, and cheer. Unfortunately, it has not yet been published, so this site is part of my attempt as a writer to build a platform—come visit, read excerpts, see my really nice rejection letters, and leave comments about how you would enthusiastically pay to buy a copy of this story. It may be an uncommon path, but who wants to read about the stuff we all do? When was the last time you bought a book about flossing?

The synopsis goes like this:

On the edge of burnout as a 30-something editor in Washington, DC, the accident-prone Jenifer Maroon finally came to terms with her life and decided to get a sex change. This was not received well by her on-again, off-again partner, so on her own, she learned, often the hard way, how not to have a gender transition, which included, as it happened, cellophane, red hair dye, and a nasty bout of cellulites, post-surgery. In the midst of 3,000 changes, Everett, as he requested to be known, asked out a graduate student by accidentally using a social networking profile he’s set up for his cat. He wondered if boy-who-used-to-be-girl could meet girl-who-usually-only-liked-other girls, and as he felt everything coming together on his wedding day, blew out his knee dancing at their reception. So maybe people never really change after all.

And just for kicks, if Stephen Colbert, Ellen Degeneres, Jon Stewart, David Letterman, or his nemesis-turned-buddy Oprah Winfrey want me to come on their show to talk about this book and my story, I will, and I won’t even ask them to cover air fare. Hear that, folks? Feel free to invite me anytime, and I promise I’ll be there! It’ll be a hoot!

Meanwhile, entertain yourselves with some of the lovely kudos I’ve received from agents. They’re clearly taken with my memoir project:

Erika Storella, The Gernert Company: “. . . what you’ve written promises to be a thoughtful and compelling book.”

Elizabeth Wales, Wales Literary Agency: “There’s a lot to recommend in your work. . . .”

Molly Friedrich, The Friedrich Agency: “I do think you have an appealing voice and an intriguing story to tell. . . .”

Danielle Chiotti, Upstart Crow Literary: “Keep writing!”

George Bick, Doug Grad Literary Agency, Inc.: “I also do apologize that, due to a recent surge of submissions, I cannot send you a more detailed reply, but please accept my congratulations for your bravery.”